Posts by Ana Marie Cox

The momentum that kept the last couple of episodes clicking along like an eerily precise percussion instrument continues with “Blockheads.” Indeed, the episode moves so merrily forward that it continues (as usual) past the credits and presumably right into the next season. The growth of “binge-watching” and longform serial television has meant that viewers are […]

It’s taken a long time for this season to click along at the pace I remember from Arrested Development’s first three outings, though comedy always flows at a faster pace in hindsight. You don’t remember the journey to get to the joke, you remember the joke. One of the many reasons that Arrested bears repeated […]

It’s all finally coming together, fellow slow-bingers, the pieces (Fakeblock, George Maharis, Maeby’s career) fall into place in George Michael’s “It Gets Better” episode. The Rube Goldbergian plot of Season 4 gains the sleek chassis it needs to glide smoothly over the finish line. “Sleek” and “smooth” are not, of course, adjectives one would normally […]

Maeby has an equivocal name but an unequivocal nature. She is decisive and, seemingly, self-assured, able to waltz into a production company as a 16-year-old and not just pass as an adult but thrive as a producer. She’s secure in her identity, even if it’s a fake one. She’s not much of a Bluth, basically. […]

This Gob-centered episode takes places almost entirely outside the established, already loopy story lines of Season 4. Though it briefly swerves into Michael’s mission, and gives some context for what we’ll eventually discover about George Michael’s situation, Gob is — as usual — operating at the fringe. In high school, apparently, Gob was the cock […]

This is the first Lucille episode, but I feel like she’s been Season 4’s most visible Bluth family member. It’s her beaching of the Queen Mary that launches a plethora of plots, and it’s her machinations that animate the herky-jerky attitudes of the Bluth family toward the border wall — and, for that matter, toward […]

I think before this whole experiment in synchronized storytelling started, I would have said that Tobias was an ancillary character, that he was the source of the series’ least-subtle jokes, and the most thinly sketched. But as Season 4 has twisted around and into itself, piling on story lines and coincidences, the Tobias episodes are […]

Of all the Bluth family members, Lindsay has the most fraught sense of self, the biggest questions about her role in the family. She grew up thinking she was Michael’s twin (twinness itself a complication of identity, multiplying it), and then discovered at the end of Season 3 that she was adopted. In “Red Hairing,” […]

Gob is a dick. He’d probably be the first to admit it. What’s amazing about the character is how much we like him anyway. In previous seasons, he’s bedded (or attempted to bed) Michael’s girlfriend, he’s romanced Lucille Two for her money, he’s been the voice of a racist puppet, pretended to kill a stripper, […]

People forget that when Arrested Development debuted, it was marketed as a comedic spin on the financial scandals of the time — Enron, Global Crossing — not a multilayered postmodern meditation on father-son relationships, identity, and avian behaviors. I remember feeling almost betrayed by the series circling back to quasi-ripped-from-the-headlines comedy with its Bluths-build-in-Iraq story […]